


Home

by kaydeefalls



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Two Lines Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-11-04
Updated: 2003-11-04
Packaged: 2017-10-09 07:31:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/84561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaydeefalls/pseuds/kaydeefalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Home is where the heart is, and other crap like that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Esther for the beta.

> _and there is a feeling that you should just go home  
> and spend a lifetime finding out just where that is_  
> \--Jump Little Children, "Cathedrals"

 

Once, an age (or a few days) ago, four teenagers sat cross-legged in a little circle in Bobby and John's room, setting up a game of cards. Rogue shuffled, the cards tripping over each other elegantly between her gloved fingers. They made a soft flapping sound, like fifty-two butterflies beating their wings. One flipped free of the rest of the deck, landing in front of Jubilee's feet. She picked it up and traced the outline of the suit – a heart.

"We're playing Hearts," Jubilee decided. Rogue plucked the card out of her hand and returned it to the deck, shuffling again. Jubilee allowed a small globe of light to appear on her palm, which gently pulsed red for a second, then winked out.

"It's poker night," John complained.

Jubilee just raised an eyebrow at him. "Hearts," she repeated. He felt the solid weight of the lighter in his jeans pocket and resisted the urge to set her hair on fire.

Rogue dealt out the cards. Hearts it was, apparently. John glanced at his hand. It was all right. A lot of diamonds, but no high hearts or spades. He passed a few of the highest hearts to Bobby and accepted more diamonds and an ace of spades from Jubilee. So one of the girls probably had the queen of spades. Fine.

"It's weird," Bobby said, leading the first hand. "You'd think hearts would be good things, right? But if you take them, you lose."

"Love can be dangerous," Rogue said softly. She smoothed a few strands of white hair back with a black satin finger, and John tried not to watch Bobby watching her.

He rolled his eyes. "Right," he said sarcastically. "I'm sure whoever came up with this game was thinking about the dangers of teenage mutant heartache."

"Maybe they thought love was evil," Jubilee suggested. "Especially with that Queen of Spades bitch."

"Oh, please," John said irritably. "They just picked a suit at random. It could've just as easily been diamonds, or clubs, or—"

"You could take the fun out of anything," Jubilee said, sticking her tongue out at him.

"And anyway, since when is love evil?" Bobby asked. John couldn't tell whether that meant Bobby was on his side in this argument or not. Argument, discussion, boring-ass conversation, whatever.

Bobby reached out to stroke Rogue's hair as he spoke, and she instinctively leaned away from his touch. John stared at his cards and restrained himself from setting _her_ hair on fire, too. "Lust is," Rogue said, trying to cover the awkward moment with a little smirk and a raised eyebrow.

"Yeah, it's one of the seven deadly sins," Jubilee agreed enthusiastically, putting down her cards to count off on her fingers. "Lust, anger, greed, gluttony…um…"

"Pride," Bobby put in. "Sloth."

"Envy," Rogue whispered. She tugged uncomfortably at the sleeve of her glove. "Mine is envy."

"What do you mean, yours?" Jubilee asked.

Rogue smiled self-consciously. "Cody and I used to talk about the seven deadly sins."

"How cheerful," John muttered.

Rogue ignored him. "We figured out which of them were ours. You know, which one applied to each of us the most. His was lust, he thought, but he used to say that just came along with being a teenager." She fiddled with her cards, then led the next hand with the three of diamonds.

"So you're envy," Jubilee said.

"Yeah," Rogue agreed, not looking at Bobby. Bobby dropped the five of diamonds on top of her card and didn't look at her, either.

"I'm sloth!" Jubilee said cheerfully. She almost never turned in a homework assignment on time.

"Pride," Bobby said. He grew an ice rose in his hand and set it gently next to Rogue's leg. Typical.

John rolled his eyes and slammed down the ace of diamonds. "So what am I, then?"

"Definitely pride!" Jubilee laughed, at the same time Bobby said "Anger!" and Rogue smirked and drawled "Greed!"

"Poor John," Jubilee smirked, eyes glinting. "You're the worst of us all." She grinned and slipped him the queen of spades.

He fiddled with the Zippo in his pocket and did not set the cards on fire. They laughed at him together, having their cute little bonding moment. He felt like he was watching them from across the room. A flick of the lighter, and they would all burn, and he would go down with them. Could he? Could he even burn? No, he would just emerge unscathed out of the holocaust, homeless and friendless as per usual.

They belonged here. So did he. Maybe. As much as he had ever belonged anywhere, he supposed.

_Envy_, he thought, and silently collected the cards as he imagined the lighter burning a hole in his pocket.

*

 

"Why Rogue?" John asked. He lay flat on his back on his bed, staring up at the shadowy ceiling. The house settled, creaking faintly.

Bobby blinked at him through the gloom. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, why her? What's so special about her?"

"I don't know," Bobby said, after a moment's silence. "Because she's Rogue, I guess."

John mentally traced the shadows on the ceiling, outlines of tree branches against the streetlight. They changed a little every night. He hated that. Things should always stay the same; that was how you knew you were home. How could you tell you belonged somewhere if it kept changing before you could get used to it? "Look, I know she's hot, but wouldn't you rather be with someone you could, you know, _be_ with?"

The sheets rustled as Bobby rolled over. John kept his gaze trained on the ceiling. "Well, yeah, obviously. But if I can't be with her, then, well, I don't want to be with anyone. You know?"

"No," John replied flatly. "I don't know."

"It's like…" Bobby paused, searching for the right words, and John cringed. Whenever Bobby needed to think about what to say, he inevitably wound up sounding trite or corny or girly. "It's like being with her is coming home, you know?"

Home is where the heart is, and other crap like that. Typical Bobby shit. "Yeah, well, you know what it's like to have something to come home to," John muttered.

"John—"

"Seriously, man, don't you ever wish you had more than your right hand to keep you company?"

Rustle-rustle-thump as Bobby got out of bed and stalked to the door. "I'm gonna get a snack," he said, his voice frosty. "See you later." He pulled the door open. The hall light shone white on the ceiling, blanking out the shadows of tree limbs.

The door slammed shut and the trees returned, ever so slightly different from what they'd been before. John closed his eyes.

*

 

There was something surreal about standing in Bobby's house. Well, not all that surreal compared to the frenzied chaos of the raid last night, to the last wild gyrations of the shadow-trees on the ceiling John might never see again. But being in Bobby's house – his home – was a whole other level of surreal. Something about this place had made Bobby the sort of person he was. Some intangible thing still hovered here, tantalizingly invisible, an essence of Bobby over time that John had never known.

There were pictures on one wall, framed photographs. The Drake family in various places and poses, Bobby and his parents and his brother and relations he had never told John about. All the complex intertwined webs of family and home and life, summarized on this one artistically arranged wall. And Bobby's face in that family portrait, smiling and happy and belonging.

When John squinted at the picture and sort of tilted his head, he could almost imagine himself in it. Bobby's brother's face shifted and twisted and became John's, happy and glowing and part of something bigger than himself. Family. What would that be like? To grow up surrounded by the same people all the time, part of one cohesive unit, in a place you could call home? To know you could go back at any time, and they'd still be there?

John hardly remembered any part of his life before the Professor found him, a teenaged hoodlum on the streets with an abnormal propensity for pyrotechnics. There was anger, and fire, and nastiness, but he chose to forget it all. No point in remembering those days.

And then Xavier had taken him in, and the school, well, that was home, wasn't it? Except that the other students all had somewhere else to go home to over holidays, and after the first time he'd wandered the empty mansion, alone, his footsteps echoing in the empty halls – well, he could never really think of it as home, after that. Just a hollow shell that needed to be filled, and could be abandoned again. Just like him.

_Don't burn anything_, Bobby had instructed him, so John clicked the lighter open and closed in his hand and tried not to think about how beautiful the wall of framed photographs would look wreathed in flame.

*

_Stay here_, the adults had told them. _Watch over the jet. We'll be back as soon as we can._ And Bobby and Rogue, like the good little schoolchildren they were, were just sitting quietly and accepting it. How cute.

As per usual, John found himself playing with his lighter. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. The flame tickled his fingertips. Bobby and Rogue watched him silently. They were probably annoyed by the repetitive sound, but too polite to bitch about it yet. _You're a god among insects_, a voice whispered in the back of his mind. Maybe they were the ones who should be envious of him, not the other way around. The tiny flame in the lighter flickered eagerly, hungrily, tugging at the edges of his consciousness. Yes.

"I hope they fix everything soon, so we can go home," Bobby said, breaking the awkward half-silence.

"Home," John sneered. "You'll never be able to go home again, will you, Bobby?" The acid in his voice surprised him, but he didn't take it back. _A god among insects._

Bobby blinked at him, stung. "I meant to the school," he said coldly.

"So that's home, now, is it?" John said. He didn't know where the nastiness was coming from, but it felt good to let it out. Restlessness and fire and not belonging – no, not even with these two, these supposed friends. Look at the way they turned to each other, exchanged looks, shut him out. _Insects._ "The Professor's really done a job on you, hasn't he? He's trained you well. His X-Men. I'll bet you can't wait to get some of those shiny black uniforms for yourself."

Rogue started to reach out to him, then pulled her hand back. "What the hell is wrong with you, John?"

_You're a god among insects. Never let anyone tell you otherwise._

John stood, clutching the lighter tightly closed in his hand to keep himself from using it. "I'm sick of this kids table shit." He slammed his palm down on the button to open the jet's ramp and stalked towards the ladder.

"John, they told us to stay here!" Rogue snapped.

He turned back, giving them a lingering, scornful look. "You always do as you're told?"

Leaving was so easy that he wondered why he hadn't done it sooner.

*

 

He hadn't gotten very far when the world flipped upside down and he felt a thousand voices screaming in his head. He fell to the ground, the wind knocked out of him, head throbbing unbearably with a piercing pain that went on for forever and a day.

Images raced through his mind at an impossible rate, memories he thought he'd locked away. He wondered if he was dying, if his life was flashing before his eyes like in some bad cliché. Did it even matter?

He saw himself as though he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope, distant and tiny and isolated. He was fourteen. He had just set a fire in a church, winked at the candles on the altar and watched them flare up. The blaze caught the wooden crosses and beams and illuminated the marble Virgin Mary with a glowing orange light. She smiled serenely down at him, unknowing, as the fires of hell raged on around her. Oh, it had been beautiful. He had stood there in the middle of the burning church, enthralled, his laughter drowned out by the crackling, spitting flames, choked by the thick black smoke. The windows shattered, stained glass depictions of Jesus and his apostles exploding in brightly colored shards. The young pyro helped it along, hurling a small silver crucifix through the image of St. John, laughing even louder as it broke with a resounding crash. His church of fire. His blazing cathedral. His.

Being in the middle of a fire like that was like being home.

The authorities hadn't found him after the church incident, but Xavier had. Xavier had taken him away from the fire. That fucker.

The pain in John's head intensified, blocking out everything else. Like water poured on a fire, killing it with a damp hiss. He was dimly aware of the snow on the ground, wetness seeping through his jeans and thin jacket. He was being killed. He was fire, and he was being put out. It hurt.

Then the fit passed as suddenly as it started, and John stumbled hazily to his feet. _What the hell was that?_

Something had fallen out of his pocket as he writhed on the ground, and he bent over to pick it up. A deck of cards. When had he taken them? During the raid? No, there hadn't been time to grab anything but the lighter. He supposed they had already been in his jeans, although that seemed kind of ridiculous. Who keeps a deck of cards in their jeans?

He'd pocketed them after the game of Hearts; that had been the night of the raid. That was only a few nights ago. At the school. Where, he abruptly realized, he'd never go back to again. And once that was decided, well, everything else just fell into place, really.

Jubilee had been taken in that raid; he'd probably never even know if she survived. Rogue would never go back to Alabama or Louisiana or wherever the hell she'd come from. Bobby's parents would never take him back.

He guessed it was true what they say, that you can't go home again. But that implied you once had a home to start with.

John flicked the lighter open and toyed with the flame for a moment, then tugged a small fireball out and set the deck of cards alight. The plastic coating stank up the air with black ash. He turned and walked away, the icy wind tugging at his jacket as the cards burned merrily behind him.

The helicopter was right where he'd known it would be. _Take me home_, he thought at it, even though he knew it couldn't. But when the door opened, he climbed inside anyway. Just in case.


End file.
